Hiding a small, quirky and very friendly place behind a drab city facade... Villa Tamara/ about 1km from Bucharest Central https://goo.gl/Wf8mmb

10mins of drizzle make for a damp start on an early Sunday morning ...with a looong day in the saddle ahead!The ONLY rain/ spittle for the entire 3 weeks!!!

Getting seen off like family

I still wonder what came of the 2 Polish girls who'd come to Bucharest for some weekend-partying and crawled into Villa Tamara just on breakfast after spiked drinks, stolen passports/ money/ phones etc.
One of them had at least 3 bottles of Rakia on her breath...if she'd tried to blow out a candle she'd taken off like Apollo13.

Everyone there?

Just short of crossing the Danube on the "Friendship-Bridge"....and slipping into Bulgaria after the first hour-and-a-half.

Sure??...better check that again!

Checking out of Romanian Customs, Goodie gets attacked by a trio of scruffy, feral fleabags snapping away at her legs. The attempt to run interference and sink a boot into at least one of the mongrels nearly makes me drop the bike :-)

Across the Friendship Bridge spanning the nearly kilometer-wide, dirty-grey and industrial Danube ....

...and straight into Bulgarian Customs on the other side.

While the main roads aren't too bad, traffic, mainly trucks from all over Europe (and beyond) are thick (and smokey) on the ground, traffic is heavy.
A short while after leaving Veliko Tarnovo in a vain attempt to find some less frequented roads towards Sofia, the capital, the group unravels and somehow bogs between trucks and other local traffic.

"Kat lost a pannier, the thing just disappeared!... somewhere between the last town and here".

Arghhh...that's 20k's or more, a hell of a long stretch to scour for a black Givi pannier...and in this sort of traffic!

An hour of 6 bikes slowly scouring the road-verges, holding up traffic while looking for a pannier that really should have exploded when coming off at 100+kmh .... or one of the trucks running over the top of it...but there isn't a single sign of either pannier-plastics or contents anywhere!

We do get some suspicious stares from the truckies though....and the yellow mini-skirted hooker plying for business at the entrance to one of the local gravel side-roads (what the hell is she doing out here in the middle of no-where?).
It's time to abandon the search and keep going, too, the afternoon is running away from us.
"One last sweep, ok? The others are waiting in the lay-by up the road, we'll meet there"...and Andrew is off for one more lap.
I wait for the gap in traffic and do the U-turn, then pull just off the verge of the road onto the tiniest bit of extra-asphalt, checking the mirrors for his headlight to appear.

Traffic roaring past, I "disconnect" for a minute nor 2, just letting the head roam as it wants.

"Wouldn't it be fumy if the damn thing just lays there in the scrubby ditch down there?"

After the 3.take I still can't believe it.
What I'm looking at is a scuffed, but intact, Givi pannier exactly down that scrubby ditch down there!